Baillie Gifford, founded in Edinburgh in 1908, is an independent investment manager - managing pension funds, investment trusts, unit trusts and ISAs. Baillie Gifford is unique in the UK in being a large-scale investment business that has remained an independent private partnership. This has allowed them to keep our efforts focused entirely on clients and their investments.

“The workshop enabled us to discover how Wallet.Services SICCAR software could support us to develop blockchain solutions quickly and easily.”

-Anurag Agrawal, Information Systems Team Leader

What did we do?

Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh based investment fund managers asked Wallet.Services to provide learning talks and workshops – you can read more about this process in their case study. Solution architects for the English public sector Looking Local commissioned a learning report from Wallet.Services, as have other Scottish local authorities and businesses, as well as the Scottish Government itself. Forward-thinking organisations are raising blockchain literacy across the enterprise so that they can get subject matter and process experts to help them understand where the technology will really make a difference now, not just ten years from now.

Why is it needed?

“Business leaders across industries see blockchain’s potential to streamline business processes, enable new business models, and potentially reshape sectors. But for most enterprises, obstacles have kept the value of blockchain more prospective than actual.”

Hannah goes onto explain that those obstacles are:

“not properly understanding the technology, and therefore not being able to see the customer, organisational, or business model value. Blockchain is an emerging technology so that presents technical challenges, but there is also the human factor: blockchain changes the way organisations collaborate, and how partners interact. Use cases for blockchain technology have to improve IT, create customer value, achieve operational or co-operational efficiencies, and therefore be implementable business models.”

How did we deliver it?

Wallet.Services has devised a framework for Strategic Transformation around blockchain that facilitates enterprises to prove the technology, customer and organisational value, and business models of blockchain. Learning and understanding about blockchain and what use cases might be appropriate will require getting hands-on through learning sessions, interactive ideation workshops, constructing business cases and building proof of concepts or pilots. Once these are underway, critical evaluation can highlight the benefits, efficiencies and improvements of blockchain.